Bodenlos and Heaven. and the ascent of be-ing as the ground turns to vapor and dissipates beneath the standing feet. how will these thoughts images intertwine? the German, rolling off tongue, with a dropping and slowing lilt. the English, heavy, gravitational in its religious orbit.

walking out of the building where people work at maintaining a certain form beyond hypostasis, Venus is low on the horizon in the irradiated semi-darkness. the semi- arising through the human re-concentration of energies. Licht. Light. Life. das Leben. I look upwards, taking care to stop walking. is this, what I see, is this heaven? it is called the collective signifier: the heavens. what is there to see but the anisotropy of matter revealing its presence? we are coalesced ejecta of novae. Ich fühle mich wie im siebten Himmel. or is it in us? the Empyrean, lifting us, vapors, to the brightness that fills the sky in the days, at the same time as burning in our chests.

and that, though known, is not brought into the path, the way. in ascendant modes, the heart intuits direction.

The foreigner (and foreign) is the one who acknowledges his own being-in-the-world that surrounds him. Thus, he gives sense to the world, and in a certain way he dominates the world. But he dominates it tragically: he does not integrate into the world. The cedar tree is foreign in my park. I am foreign in France. Humankind is foreign in the world. — Vilém Flusser

beginning of the year. putzing with WordPress for deployment of an aporee alternate channel in blog form. I don’t like Wordpress because of the gap in my applied CSS knowledge that precludes easy modding of the GUI, but will work with it for awhile. the idea would be to get a coder to code a script to migrate everything to Wordpress from the pmachine blog, and then get the whole site up into SQL format, all headings, and so on… slowly. while other things happen.

a fine afternoon hike in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area with a small group of folks that Howard assembled. fantastic weather, occasional views of the City shimmering south across the Bay, groves of (relatively) small second-growth Coastal Redwoods, some huge manzanitas (this is their optimal zone) and good conversation.

Here in the countryside village of Tilmanstone, Kent, in a Manor House once owned by a family who were Fascist organizers in the UK. I’m staying with David and Francis. Francis picked me up yesterday at Heathrow on my arrival from Iceland on an early morning flight. I was in Iceland for three days only, having flown there from New York on the 13th mainly to visit with Loki.

Everybody slept in until noon, something I haven’t done since I can remember! Usually up at 7:30 am. I was exhausted from jet-lag and a late night dinner with friends in Reykjavík and just the accumulated stress of travel. David had also just returned from New York City — on tour with a group of his students at the Winchester School of Art — we had already met at my friends Stefan and Ellen’s flat in Tribeca last week — but that’s another story…

Today we went to Deal, a village on the coast near Dover, for sandwiches at a caf.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

“Make ‘em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ‘em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ‘em once a week.”

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. — Douglas Adams

Then on to Canterbury for a stroll around the exterior grounds of the famous cathedral. We also visited with Lizzie and Jeffrey and their son Thomas not far from the cathedral. Jeffrey is a long-time member of the Brit-Rock group Caravan, is a member of Penguin Cafe, and is currently touring with the French pop legend Reneau. Thomas is nine and is into hypnotism and Pharaohs and he showed me a family album of photos of his grandfather who brought the first Model T Fords to Chile in the early parts of the 20th Century…